Most traditional telecommunications services are essentially point-to-point in nature, that is, such services involve communication between a single originating device and a single receiving device. Examples of such point-to-point services include traditional telephone and many on-demand content delivery services such as data downloading, on-demand data streaming.
In recent times, however it has become apparent that broadcast services, or point-to-multipoint services, are attractive to both service providers and customers. For instance customers may be happy to receive some information, e.g. news bulletins and weather reports via a broadcast service. For network providers, broadcast services offer the ability to more efficiently use network resources to send information to a plurality of users compared to servicing the same number of users using point-to-point services.
One point-to-multipoint service that has been developed is the MBMS which has recently been standardized by the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) in 3GPP TS 25.346. In release 6 of this and other related standards, the ability for the user equipment to conduct soft combining of a plurality of MBMS signals from neighboring cells is mandated. However no specific method for soft combining is mandated in this standard. The applicant's co-pending Australian complete patent application, filed on the same day as the present application, and entitled “MBMS soft combining scheme” (the contents of which are incorporated herein by reference) offers one method of performing soft combining of MBMS signals.
Accordingly there is a need for additional methods for use in performing soft combining in a user equipment that is receiving a multimedia broadcast multicast service.